Manage

The Vice President of "everything else."

That pretty much describes the role of today’s facilities managers. Twenty-first century workplaces are a complex web of interconnected systems. They encompass the physical buildings, the spaces within, and the underlying technologies that make them tick. Just as important are the people using the space and doing the work. Their physical and emotional needs, and by extension, the company culture as a whole, must be taken into consideration. It’s a lot to manage.

As with any ecosystem, predicting and managing the patterns – the ebb and flow of disparate projects, new people, relocations, re-orgs, new technologies and more – is a tricky business. The most adept facilities managers can recognize the early warning signals and what they foretell. But averting crises, or at least tamping them down, requires diverse skills backed up with multiple contingency plans.